Joseph S Nye had coined the term ‘Soft Power’ in late 1980s. Broadly it means occupying mind spaces and winning hearts, not through military prowess but through art, culture, music, philosophical traditions and knowledge systems.
In the context of Bharat, soft power has been at the very foundation of its global identity and influence since time immemorial. But we tend to ignore this aspect in contemporary context especially during the public discourses about global narratives. Connecting Through Culture: An overview of India’s soft power strengths is an exhaustive anthology that brings out the depth and range of Bharat’s soft power and helps to understand its global potential. There are 23 essays in this collection which cover almost every possible shade of the soft power spectrum of Bharat ranging from Ayurveda to Textiles, Music to Cuisines, spirituality to folk art and Yoga to Ganga.
Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, who has edited this anthology along with Sachchidanand Joshi brings to the fore an interesting paradigm about Bharat’s own democratic traditions which are much older than the western democratic systems. Sahasrabuddhe traces the history of democratic traditions in his essay (Democracy: The DNA of India), “Choosing leaders or rulers by voting was… prevalent in ancient India probably predating the janapadas and mahajanapadas that existed some 2,500 years ago. Instances of rajas, or kings chosen by the janas, or the people, find mention in textual sources. Researchers have identified well-established practices and rules and regulations regarding seating arrangements in the assemblies, as well as motions, resolutions, quorums, whips counting of votes, voting by ballot, censure motions and so on. For example, the Pali canon mentions the asanapannapaka, or regulator of seats and the salaka-ghapaka, or election officer.”
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He goes on to explain in detail how the indigenously evolved Panchayati raj system worked here effectively since ancient times. Underlining the fundamental issues that often come up vis-?-vis our present democratic system that often appears to be flawed, he observes, “Post-independence India adopted the headcount-based Westminster style of democracy, which had evolved out of the individual rights narrative. It can be argued that India’s first-past-the-post system, inbuilt in the Westminster model, has promoted fragmentation of society and vote bank politics.”
In another interesting essay, Sachchidananda Joshi traces the origin and expanse of India’s world view — Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — that has remained unchanged ever since the Bharatiya civilisation came into existence on this earth. The phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam means the whole world is one family. It has been taken from Samavediya Mahopanishad, an ancient Sanskrit treatise. The same phrase, with slight deviation, is found in another ancient Sanskrit text Hitopadesha. Joshi writes, “The Sanskrit phrase ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ is engraved in the entrance hall of the parliament of India…Isn’t it simply beautiful to note that a phrase composed during the time of the compilation of the Vedic corpus is mirrored in the didactic tradition of India and has been passed down the ages to modern times, being inscribed in our very temple of democracy-the Indian parliament?”
Quoting the Bhagavad Gita, the Vishnu Purana and several other ancient texts, Joshi establishes quite convincingly, “Since time immemorial, the Indian textual tradition has encouraged us to see the world around us with a sense of respect and clarity. This can only happen when one is endowed with a holistic vision. One has to rise above the man-made distinctions of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘myself’ and accept the world as one.” That is precisely the vision that is required for conflict-resolution in the contemporary world.
In the essay titled ‘Sanskrit: The Oldest Language of Wisdom,’ Madhu Khanna traces the impact of Sanskrit on the world. In the words of Indologist William Jones, “The Sanscrit language …(is) of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek. More copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity.”
Highlighting the soft power of Sanskrit as a language and as a symbol of culture, Khanna writes, “Over a period of millennia, thousands of treatises in Sanskrit were carried by monks, scholars, sages and savants across parched deserts, seas and high mountain ranges… Over a thousand Sanskrit manuscripts have been discovered in Central Asia… From China to Mediterranean, Sanskrit left its mark… the Pallava, Gupta, Pala and Chola dynasties promoted the spread of Sanskritic culture in Southeast Asia.”
‘The study of Ashtadhyayi, the seminal thesis by the Sanskrit grammarian, Panini, who lived in the middle of the first millennium BCE, revolutionised the field of linguistics. The pioneers of modern linguistics, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield, were Sanskrit scholars. Many prominent linguists, in fact, have studied Sanskrit to learn Panini’s grammar.’
Khanna highlights the fact that contrary to the common perception there is a growing interest in Sanskrit in India as well as across the globe. ‘It is taught in hundreds of institutions across the world, including 14 universities in Germany and 150 in India…an additional reason for the growing interest in Sanskrit is the suggestion made in 1985 by researcher Rick Briggs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), that the rule-based grammar of Sanskrit had significant lessons in terms of natural language processing. In his paper in AI magazine, ‘Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence’, Briggs observed that studying Panini could aid artificial intelligence programmers to solve the problem of understanding natural language.’
All 23-essays in ‘Connecting Through Culture‘ provide an authentic connection with myriad shades of Bharat’s soft power and help the readers to realise their potential in terms of a global impact. It also, however, brings out the irony that we as a society appear to be smitten by Western-centric approach in creating a global impact rather than harnessing our own soft power.
(Connecting Through Culture: An Overview of India’s Soft Power Strengths; Editors: Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Sachchidanand Joshi; Wisdom Tree)
The reviewer has authored several books. He tweets @ArunAnandLive. Views expressed are personal
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